Lab journal
News & milestones.
Research updates, publications, and recognition from the Cyber Innovation Lab.
- Aug 2026Research, Awards
Dr. Nick Rahimi Receives 2026 USM Applied Research Award
Dr. Nick Rahimi has received the 2026 Applied Research Award from the USM Office of the Provost for his success in translating basic research into practical scientific and social solutions.
Read more - Aug 2026Promotion
Dr. Nick Rahimi Appointed Associate Director for Cybersecurity & AI Initiatives
Dr. Nick Rahimi has been named the Associate Director for Cybersecurity & AI Initiatives at the school of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering.
- July 2026Publication
Redemption Score accepted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Ashim Dahal, Ankit Ghimire, Saydul Akbar Murad, and Nick Rahimi developed a multimodal framework for evaluating image captions.
Read more - June 2026Research
POVQA presented at CVPR Workshops
The team presented a rationale-guided approach to video question answering at the CVPR Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning workshop.
Read more - May 2026Research
Barsat Khadka and collaborators study email social engineering
A new preprint with Nick Rahimi combines graph learning and language models to detect social engineering in email networks.
Read more - May 2026Recognition
Nick Rahimi named Mentor of the Year
The lab director received Southern Miss recognition for mentorship in science and engineering.
- April 2026Recognition
Saydul Akbar Murad joins Graduate Student Hall of Fame
Murad was recognized by Southern Miss for his research and service before joining Emporia State University.
Read more - April 2026Student award
Ashim Dahal receives undergraduate symposium award
Dahal received the Best Presentation on Computational Approaches award at the Drapeau Center for Undergraduate Research symposium.
- March 2026Research
Ankit Ghimire leads Bitcoin transaction graph study
Ghimire, Saydul Akbar Murad, and Nick Rahimi compare graph learning in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces.
Read more - March 2026Research
Oluseyi Olukola and Nick Rahimi share attack-aware intrusion detection research
Their AMDS preprint studies adaptive defenses for adversarial network intrusion detection.
Read more - 2026Alumni
Saydul Akbar Murad joins Emporia State University
After completing his Ph.D. at Southern Miss, Murad joined Emporia State University as an assistant professor.
Read more - October 2025Conference
Student teams present cybersecurity research at SEDE and CAINE
Derek Taylor, Mukesh Poudel, Pappu Jha, Hanzla Hamid, Oluseyi Olukola, and Ashim Dahal contributed papers with Nick Rahimi.
Read more - Summer 2025Research support
Ashim Dahal receives summer research grant
A $5,500 Drapeau Center for Undergraduate Research grant supported Dahal’s work on efficient 4D Gaussian streaming with Nick Rahimi and Rabab Abdelfattah.
Read more - 2025Research support
Lab team contributes to NASA EPSCoR project
Ashim Dahal helped draft research objectives for a $51,000 NASA EPSCoR-funded project led by Nick Rahimi.